[mythtv-users] Hardware ideas

Stephen Tait tait at digitallaw.co.uk
Thu Jun 24 18:45:46 EDT 2004


>
>Wow.

<penis>Almost as good as my dual Athlon MP with 500GB of RAID1 on a 3ware 
8506-8 in a PCI-X slot with gigabit ethernet</penis> ;^)

>See, there's my problem. If it's not stable it'll drive me crazy. I have
>enough finicky stuff around the house as it is.

The 350 framebuffer is perfectly stable so long as you're prepared to 
install teh haXx0r3d version of XFree

>This is really informative. Thank you. See, I've been archiving my DVDs
>into the computer for a while now, and there's a smattering of codecs at
>this point. All playable under my current desktop linux, but they'd need
>to work on whatever new video card I set up.

The EPIA is OK for most MPEG4 from what I've seen, but will choke on high 
res stuff. I was *very* tempted by these boards until I found this out, as 
I too have a few hundred of my DVD rips on the file server.

> > You'll save a few bucks, but spending the extra money for a PVR-x50 is 
> worth
> > it, IMO. For reference, I have four hardware encoder cards and two software
> > ones. The two software ones now do nothing more than tune FM radio on my
> > workstation, three of the hardware encoder cards are in my production Myth
> > boxes, one in my dev box. You can always transcode to mpeg4 post-mpeg2
> > capture if space is a concern.
>
>Point taken.

Same thing here. I record in highest-res-possible MPEG2, and if it's worth 
saving it gets transcoded into MPEG4/XviD. The major frontend has 180GB (80 
+ 120 LVM) of space, and I don't watch enough TV to fill it up. As an 
aside, I prefer mencoder to myth's inbuilt transcoding utils (for one 
thing, I know what container format it uses!).


> > I have the CoolerMaster ATC-620C-BX1 myself. I love it. Far more than 
> any of
> > Antec's supposed HTPC cases.

Amen to that - I have one, and it's superb. Pity they don't make them any 
more (in fact, they just seem to make semi-sucky cases now, grr!). 



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